El Cazador de la Bruja

Nadie is a bounty hunter with an attitude, and she's got a lock on her next target: Ellis, a young amnesiac girl who is a suspect in the murder of a famous scientist. Nadie manages to apprehend Ellis, but on a whim, decides to accompany her to Wiñay Marka, a place which supposedly holds the key to unlocking Ellis's memories and her mysterious past. However, Nadie cautions Ellis that this does not mean she will go free—once Ellis has found what she is looking for, Nadie will turn her over to the authorities. With Ellis's connection to a gemstone called the Inca Rose as their only guide, the two set off on their journey south through Mexico to search for the mysterious "Eternal City" of Wiñay Marka.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Nadie Main

Itou, Shizuka Japanese

Ellis Main

Shimizu, Ai Japanese

L.A. Supporting

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

Lirio Supporting

Inoue, Marina Japanese

Hayward, Jodie Supporting

Hisakawa, Aya Japanese

Ricardo Supporting

Tachiki, Fumihiko Japanese

Natalia Supporting

Kobayashi, Sanae Japanese

Rosenberg, Douglas Supporting

Miyake, Kenta Japanese

Schneider, Heinz Supporting

Miki, Shinichiro Japanese

Gonzales, Iris Supporting

Kuwashima, Houko Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Kitayama, Shigeru Producer

Mashimo, Kouichi Director, Script

Kawatsura, Shinya Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

Apr 29, 2023

SplendorofSouls

Recommended

This will not be a systematic review, but rather I would like to share with you my experience of the anime and a story that is an experiential journey matches wonderfully well with the roadless journey Nadie and Ellis set out on.

The Storyboard:
Whoever made the storyboard for this series deserves a ***damn award - I dare say it's on level with what you'd expect from Paul Verhoeven. Forget Dutch angles, these guys push it to the limit for intensity. Besides being great at building tension and letting intensity rise (through shots, shot sequences and -development, together with the music), they also have a wonderful ... sense for the calmth and poetry of life, expressed in various ways, which involves storyboard and animation jointly reaching that experiential wavelength of the aesthetic of life.

Guns:
Nadie is a bounty hunter, so one shouldn't be surprised that there's a lot of lead-slingin' in the anime. There is a wide variety of guns, I'd estimate on par with that of Black Lagoon. The guns used are classics (*gun spoiler: 1911, Desert Eagle, Berettas, revolvers, M60, uzis, I think also M16s or ARs, a Browning machine gun, Glock and perhaps Browning 9mm), they are drawn beautifully and also the action is great (from the slide mechanism and its speed to the effect of getting hit by a bullet), as far as Nadie's gun is concerned they even considered mag capacity - key animation did some good research, I'll say. And on one occasion the slide mechanism of Nadie's gun is slowed down, clearly for dramatic purposes within the ambience of the scene, so the viewer can really enjoy its beauty. (*gun spoiler: there's also one gun -I'm no expert- which I think is not based on a real gun, but invented by key animation and which looks like a fusion between an AK and an uzi, perhaps with a design hint of HK. If invented by key animation, they did a great job, cause it looks pretty great as a whole and I could be convinced it's based on a real gun.)
If you like Black lagoon or Jormungand for this reason, El Cazador de la Bruja will set your soul ablaze, like the burnin' desert heat under which Nadie and Ellis's fates enroll.

References/parodies (*this section is a spoiler):
The series also contains references to other movies or anime. At least I've noticed these references: Rambo and also one small nod to Revy from Black Lagoon.
Of course Nadie's design reminds of the design of Jo from Bakuretsu Tenshi.

The Music:
The music is good and a great match for the various ambiences they intended to create. Exciting music during the action, nicely rhythmically combined with storyboard and other sound, wonderfully sense-prickling attention-holding music while intensity and tension continue to rise.

The Story / The Concept / The Setting / Characters and -Development:
The story is set in southern North America, Mexico to be precise - the desert, certain streets, the house colourings, tacos and the phrase 'amigo' capture this, as well as Nadie's design of course. This setting is not too common in anime and therefore adds a nice flavor - it also works well with the story and the journey through the desert.
The story concerns the journey of Nadie and Ellis through the blazin' desert heat, where multiple different characters with different backgrounds and associations come to interact with Nadie and Ellis with varying intentions and goals, interrelated, sometimes in line with each other, sometimes opposed, which allows for enough characters, character development and elements to keep the story interesting, without inserting so many characters that it would become too much to properly develop within the span of episodes available. Character development primarily concerns Nadie and Ellis, though other characters have also got varying degrees of character development.
The concept of the story / the anime involves a bounty hunter, witches (as the title indicates), science, ancient Inca stones and all this in a modern setting. How they thought through the concept of a witch, developed it in this anime and how they related all these different elements to each other is very original and quite interesting. I resist the urge to develop this in depth, for my intention is not to spoil - now, seek out El Cazador de la Bruja and uncover these hidden truths yourself!

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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May 23, 2024

Sealjani

Mixed Feelings

I don't really hate this anime, the first 24 episodes are between fine and good, the two protagonists are nice, and the music is great. It can be a little bit slow in some parts, and the development of some episodes is senseless (specially when trying to involve romance).

My bigger problem is with the 25th episode (which basically is the resolution of the main plot) is extremely bad, the quantity of bad decisions the characters make in this chapter is maddening, and the way things are solved does not fit with the rest of the story.

I loved the 26th episode though, I do can consider ... it a good ending.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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Aug 9, 2022

RyanSpring

Not Recommended

This is a stellar example of anime mediocrity. It isn't particularly good, but it isn't blatantly terrible either. There's several obvious flaws and imperfections here that keep it from being anything beyond the middling, forgettable anime that it is.

Starting on a positive note, the biggest strength of this anime has to be its soundtrack. Some of the songs certainly get a bit overused, and it's exasperated by the bloatedness and pacing issues I'll be discussing later, but the soundtrack is definitely better than the anime itself.

I'd also praise the main character designs of the two leads. They don't remind me of characters from other anime ... and the creative team managed to make two appealing and likeable female characters without making a point to sexualize them. Neither one has huge boobs or prances around in a tiny outfit or falls into all the tropes one might expect from a "two girls traveling together" situation.

For things this anime does notably well, that's unfortunately probably where it ends...

For sure some parts of this anime have aged quite poorly and would cause a stir if it were released today. There are two antagonistic characters, used in multiple episodes as a running joke, whose names in the credits are literally "Transvestite A" and "Transvestite B". I'm not convinced that was appropriate in 2007 (when this came out) but it definitely isn't in 2021. Likewise, there's a late episode where a child repeatedly refers to a character as "she-man". Some of this may just be cultural differences, as these things, especially at that time, may have been viewed differently in Japan than they are elsewhere, but for me as a Westerner they stood out in the worst way like a sore thumb.

Quality assurance issues exist in multiple places in the English dub. In an early episode the girls escape in a getaway car and we get three shots from different angles of this. In the first, one of the girls is in the driver's seat and the other is in the passenger seat. In the second, which is supposed to be seconds later from another angle, their positions have miraculously been reversed but then in the next shot they're back to where they were originally. Likewise, there's an egregiously bad dubbing fail in a middle episode where the speaking character's lips move to say something, the words and the lip moving blatantly stop, and then the camera zooms in on that character's mouth and clear as day her lips move again (probably intended as her muttering something under her breath or something along those lines) but no words are spoken whatsoever. She simply moves her lips and nothing comes out. Issues like these are just plain sloppy and absolutely should have been caught and addressed before release.

Addressing the story itself, while this isn't the slowest or grindiest anime I've ever seen, there's absolutely nowhere near enough meat on the bone here to justify 26 episodes. Normally when something is 26 episodes and I say that it didn't need to be it means we could have done with 22, or 20, or 18. In this case, even 16 is probably too many. You could have easily told this entire story, which really is paper thin, in 12 episodes. The entirety of the story is "the girls travel South and try to discover Ellis' backstory". Subplots and character development fall somewhere between non-existent and bare minimal and the vast majority of this anime leading up to its forgettable and unspectacular conclusion are just plot-irrelevant filler. They disguise it nicely, but this anime is more or less episodic. Almost every episode is vastly irrelevant filler that has no baring on the main story and then three or four minutes of actual progress regarding the bigger picture. The story moves, and it's not a super slow and boring watch somehow, but it moves very slowly and has no shortage of unnecessary pieces.

While I praise the creators for at least not sexualizing the lead girls, this anime nevertheless falls into tons of tropes and cliches. The main villain is a super lame and generic cardboard cutout who has planned everything all in advance and knows with perfect accuracy exactly what's going to happen, the power of love and friendship and magic and all that good stuff can perform plot-relevant miracles, there are multiple ultra-forced catch phrases that are overused that come off as super cringe as opposed to cool and this anime's setting and time period can't decide what they want to be. People have computers and modern cell phones and advanced scientific technology that can create human beings, but some towns, when the plot would fall apart if the leads could just make a phone call, are conveniently stuck in a time lock and are still in the Old West.

Looking back now, this review turned out quite a bit longer than I thought it would for an anime that I won't remember in three months. Nevertheless, I've got some last words, so I'm gonna say em- This is mediocre and forgettable (or skippable if you've haven't watched it yet and are on the fence) and unless you're a hardcore fan wanting to watch anything and everything you can find for the sake of saying you've watched it, there are almost certainly better things you could be doing with 26 episodes worth of your time.

OBJECTIVE RATING- 5.5-6
PERSONAL ENJOYMENT RATING- 6

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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	Poll: El Cazador de la Bruja Episode 19 Discussion cyruz - Aug 15, 2007	14 replies	by mo_lave »» Aug 1, 8:14 PM
	Poll: El Cazador de la Bruja Episode 16 Discussion Faust721 - Jul 25, 2007	15 replies	by mo_lave »» Jul 30, 4:26 PM
	Poll: El Cazador de la Bruja Episode 11 Discussion cyruz - Jun 16, 2007	8 replies	by mo_lave »» Jul 28, 9:33 AM
	Poll: El Cazador de la Bruja Episode 12 Discussion cyruz - Jun 22, 2007	11 replies	by Lost_Viking »» Jun 23, 10:08 PM
	Poll: El Cazador de la Bruja Episode 3 Discussion zanmato666 - Apr 20, 2007	25 replies	by Phobossus »» Mar 13, 5:46 AM

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